Watcher of the Dead (4 page)

“THAT’S THE SITE of the old
roundhouse.â€

Lost Men

THEY WALKED FOR an hour through the
darkness. A group of Maimed children followed them. The eldest, a
girl with stringy blond hair and missing teeth, threw a stone. A
single look from Mallin prevented any further missiles from being
loosed. The ranger cut quite a figure, Bram realized. Tall and lean
in his long saddle coat, he moved like a man who knew what to do in a
fight. Bram tried to follow his lead, keeping his chin high and his
back straight. This was his first proper mission with Mallin and he
didn’t want to make any mistakes.

The cliffs were mined with caves.
People came out of them to watch Mallin and Bram pass. A large
bonfire was burning on one of the upper ledges and Argola led them
steadily upward toward it. After two days without sleep, Bram’s
eyeballs ached and his leg muscles protested the climb. Mallin must
have been weary too but you wouldn’t have known it. He seemed
focused and alive.

“Always one for a pretty hat,
Hew.â€

A Day in the Marshes

CHEDD’S CHIN WASN’T looking
good. The cut under his jaw was black and wet-looking and his entire
lower face looked puffy. His hands went to the wound constantly.
“Doesn’t feel right, Eff.â€

Hailstone

“ROBBIE DUN DHOONE has crowned
himself a king.â€

He Picked Up the Sword and Fought

THEY BROUGHT HIM in. Pain was like a
wild animal, tearing at the soft sections of his body, pulling him
apart. He did not understand how he could bear it. Anticipating
blacking out, he suspended most forms of thought. They dropped him on
the bed. He blinked at the ceiling and it began to turn like a giant
millwheel, slowly at first as it juddered into motion, then more
quickly as it gained momentum.

He was dazzled by the sight. It was the
night sky, rendered in perfect moving form, wheeling clockwise as it
should, turning around the pole star. This must be what the Sull had
intended when they carved the constellations into the chamber’s
ceiling, this instant when a world of pain and loss could be soothed
by a world of stars.

Like sorcerers they paid no heed to
their enchantment. They moved above him, unfastening buckles and
latches, not ungently stripping him of armor and clothes. White hot
pain burst across his rib cage as they peeled off the breastplate. It
had an indentation as big as a fist, and the cartilage of his ribs
had collapsed around it. Words were exchanged. Beautiful Sull words
that sounded like spells.

He lost time.

Moonsnake bided in the darkness, her
pale and massive form curled around itself forming a solid disk of
snake. She waited for him now, he’d noticed. At some point in
their acquaintance he had ceased to be extra weight. Let us hunt, she
bid in language so primal he had to translate it into words. Images
and tastes flashed across his eyes and tongue. A deer shivering as it
died. A longbone snapping in two. The sugar-sweet spray of bone
marrow.

No, he told her. Something, some half
remembered promise to himself, warned him to resist.

She hissed.

He opened his eyes. The stars had
stopped turning and the pain returned. Night air descending through
the moonholes chilled him. They were working on his naked body,
stitching flaps of skin together with black thread, smearing
yellow-red ointment on open wounds, bandaging his ribs and wrist. Did
I lose another fight?

Memories of swordfights floated in his
head. There was no order to them, no way to be sure which one had
occurred most recently, just a procession of beatings and stabbings
and slicing where steel points came at him from all sides. Slowly,
over the course of an hour, one of the memories settled into place.

“Addie.â€

Morning Star

LOCAL BELIEF HELD that it was good luck
to enter the city of Morning Star during the few seconds of sunrise
on cloudless days in late winter and early spring when the sun first
appeared in the east and before its rays had a chance to extinguish
the morning star in the west. Angus Lok entered the city at such a
moment but he didn’t believe in luck.

The city on the red lake glowed pink
and golden in the early light. Angus entered by the West Gate, and as
he was traveling without horse, pack, or serious weaponry he was
waved through without examination. The Morning Guard’s interest
had fallen on a group of mounted Half-Bluddsmen. In an earlier life
Angus might have stepped in to aid the fierce yet nervous-looking
clansmen. In this life he slid quietly away.

The Star, as the city was known to its
residents, was split in two by the Eclipse River, which ran north
from the lake. Entering by the West Gate placed you in the West Face
of the city and to cross to the East Face meant taking a short ferry
ride or crossing one of the half-dozen bridges and paying the Lord
Rising a copper penny for the privilege. Angus Lok was just fine
where he was. It was the poorer half of the city, peopled by
fishermen, workmen, beggars, bidwives, mercenaries, men-at-arms,
prostitutes and market traders. He knew this place, knew its streets
and its dangers, knew where to go to get the best ale in the city and
where to avoid unless you were spoiling for a fight.

The area just north of the gate was
known as the Crater. A shanty-town of wood huts, tents, cabins and
lean-tos had been raised in a bowl-like depression on a mound above
the Eclipse. Spring was flood season and not all the streets were
passable. Angus took what routes he could. Boards had been laid
across the mud in some places. In other places the brown red mud
flowed like lava, its surface slowly hardening to crust.

Money was Angus’ first order of
business. Since Ille Glaive he’d been spending coin raised in
the sale of his sword and he was down to his last coppers. Normally
money wasn’t a problem. The Phage were many things and poor
wasn’t one of them. Any city in the North, most large towns,
some villages and even some one-room alehouses on the road: Phage
gold could be had in all of them. The brotherhood held wealth in many
locations. A word in the right place to the right person and a purse
with enough currency to live on for a year would be dropped
discreetly into your hand. The Phage hoarded Sull gold, Forsaken
gold, Forsaken property, Bone Temple riches, treasure sneaked from
failing kingdoms, jewels given for services rendered, and others
taken when debts went unpaid. They sat on their wealth like an old,
suspicious man, stashing it in different places so that no one could
get everything if he died.

Morning Star was the Phage’s main
staging ground in the North. There were rooms in this city that, if
you were to enter them with a lamp, you’d swear you’d
walked into an enchanted palace made of gold. Angus had been in those
rooms—they were belowground, always belowground: you could not
trust the weight of gold on wood planks nailed across a frame—but
they were not his destination today. Phage currency came at a price.
Take it and you would be tracked. Somewhere someone would stick a pin
in a board and think to himself, There is Angus Lok.

Even now, careful as he had been, Angus
rated his chances of evading the eye of the Phage as low. This was
their city. Even if the Morning Guard had not marked him, a walk down
any street might be enough. Angus knew to avoid certain places—the
arms market in the west, the scribes’ quarter, river gardens,
and courthouses in the east—but you could not plan for a chance
encounter on an unlikely street as someone who knew or worked for the
Phage was out buying fresh fish or hothouse melons for his or her
family. Angus accepted this risk. There was a point in most missions
where stealth had to be cast aside.

The shortest route to the money-lending
quarter required crossing the silk market. Angus foresaw no problem
with this and entered the colorful tents and stalls of the largest
clothing market in the North. It was early and vendors were still
setting out their wares. Merchants and bidwives were draping their
stalls with red-and-gold ribbons, bolts of turquoise cloth,
embroidered belts and boned bodices, horn-and-paper fans, fake
jewels, silk purses, lace collars and straw hats. Angus felt the skin
on his face tighten as he walked between the stalls. A hole opened up
in his chest and it was suddenly difficult to breath. Stopping, he
put a hand on a tent pole for support.

“What’s the matter, lovey?
Too much of the black stuff last night?â€

This Old Heart

BIG BORRO WAS dead. Midge Pool dead.
Wullam Rudge. Quingo Faa, who had been some convoluted cousin of
Hammie’s. Thirteen Bluddsmen dead in all, and a couple not
likely to make it. The numbers kept mounting and Vaylo wondered what
had happened to his jaw. Right now he could not think as a Bludd
chief should think: I’ll get the bastards who did this.

The enemy was a phantom. You could not
kill what was already dead. There was no glory to be claimed on this
field, no satisfaction in bettering the foe. Just horror and
uncertainty, and no sense that the battle was won. How many had
attacked in the Deadwoods? Four? Five? Against forty men. The Dog
Lord did not understand odds like that. When Bluddsmen outnumbered
their foe they won.

Vaylo began a circuit of the camp. It
was one of those bleak spring days where the wind whipped at ground
level and the rain turned into that persecutor of spirits: sleet.
They were just northwest of the Bluddhouse, tactfully camped on the
edge of Quarro’s sights on the slope of a west-facing hill.
Four hours ago at dawn Odwin Two Bear and Hammie Faa had left on a
mission to parley with Quarro, and Vaylo was awaiting their return.

On the whole he didn’t hold out
much hope.

Nan was sitting by the campfire doing
something with her hair. As soon as she caught sight of his face she
stood. Vaylo waved her down. Her comforts would not work on him now.
Idly, without thinking, he whistled for his dogs. Together he and the
three animals headed up-slope to look at the house they’d once
called home.

Some said it was the ugliest roundhouse
in the clanholds; Vaylo reckoned they might be right. He’d
certainly ruled his fair share of them. Dhoone was like an ice
palace, cool and blue, built to impress. Ganmiddich looked like
something out of a fairy tale, with its tower and green walls and
beach upon the Wolf. Bludd was a steaming mound. Ockish used to call
it the Dunghouse, but he’d beat you senseless if you agreed
with him. Vaylo had always thought the woods surrounding it were
pretty. He found them beautiful today.

They used to say that if you wanted to
make friends with a Bludd chief gift him with the seeds of a rare red
tree. The saying appealed to something in Vaylo, though he suspected
it had never been true. There were some nice trees in the woods and a
couple of them you wouldn’t see anywhere else in the North,
fancy things with leaves like red lace and others with bark like
rusted metal, but you could have given the rarest tree in the world
to Gullit or his father Choddo and you would have got a smack in the
teeth for your trouble.

Abruptly Vaylo turned away. He had
spotted Odwin and Hammie riding back on the hill trail and he did not
think it was a good sign that they brought no one with them.

“Tell Quarro I come in peace. The
chiefship is his and I make no claim upon it. Allow me entry so that
together we may defend our house against all threats.â€

Stillwater

“I’M NOT PUTTING my feet in
that water,â€

Target Practice

“IT’S THE HEART,â€

Small Game

THEY HUNTED CLOSE to the den and only
tracked small game. They cornered an opossum in its set and dragged
it into the moonlight to feed. Things were shifting within them and
this would be their last meal before the full moon. Digestion took
the largest toll on their life-force and they need to conserve, to
rest. Releasing musk from their scent gland, they returned to the
den, trailing a welcome in the snow.

Watcher hissed when they woke him, and
lashed out as they tended his wounds. The Copper One reacted quickly,
but Watcher was quicker and he took out a piece of neck. A dart
jabbed his arm straight after that, and he found himself staring at
the ceiling, aware of activity and hushed voices around him but
unable to move. Someone brought a wet rag and cleaned the blood and
tissue from his fingers. His nails were humped and yellow like claws.

A female reached over the bed to tend
his left arm. Watcher regarded the curve of her breast, followed it
to the bare, golden skin at her throat. Sull. The word jumped nerves
in his heart. The female backed away, responding to the unexpected
motion of his chest. She said something to one of the others, Sull
words that he made no attempt to understand. They lied. That was all
he needed to know.

Next they dressed him for battle. They
took less care now and did not bother with chest padding or leg
armor. They turned him to strap on the back plate and then left him,
stomach down on the bed. Gradually, over the course of an hour, his
body returned to him and he rose and drank water from the bucket. One
of the moonholes was directly overhead and he looked up and saw the
three-quarter moon above him.

He did not go gently when they came to
take him to the fight circle. The Sull prodded him forward with their
spears. Copper One was not among them. Watcher was glad. He wished
him dead.

The forest smelled darkly green and
full of meat. Moths spiraled in hopeless circles toward the moon. One
of the spear holders released a hand from his spear shaft to brush
away a moth close to his face. Watcher smashed the Sull’s hand
into his jaw and yanked the spear from his grip. The Sull gasped in
pain, stumbled to his knees. Blood welled from the collapsed cave of
his mouth. Arming the spear, Watcher turned. The two remaining Sull,
one male, one female, pinned him with their spearpoints. Watcher
heaved his spear at the female, plunging it into her chest. As she
collapsed in a fountain of blood, Watcher released the shaft and
stepped back from the male’s spearpoint. Grabbing the socket
just below the blade, he jerked it back with force. The wings of the
blade punctured the heel of his hand and little finger as he dragged
the Sull in a quarter circle and then impaled him with the spear
butt.